Editorial: Connecticut lawmakers leave bad FOI law on the books

After the Sandy Hook massacre, Connecticut legislators acted in haste to write up a bill restricting access to crime scene photos. The bill was passed quickly — without much discussion and without a public hearing.

A task force was created after the fact to study these changes and make recommendations to the legislature for how the law could be improved.

This task force made several recommendations, trying to balance the public’s right to know with victims’ right to privacy. Two pieces of legislation came out of these recommendations: a good one and a bad one. The good one favored the public’s right to know and the bad one favored more secrecy. Neither of these bills was acted on in this legislative session.

Now, it is unlikely the last-minute law restricting access to what used to be public documents will change for a long time.

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Access to information could potentially expose wrongdoing. It helps hold public officials accountable for their actions. This includes holding law enforcement officers — paid for by taxpayer money — accountable for how they investigate major crimes.

A year ago, the public would have had access to crime scene photos from homicides. In fact, the public has had access to these since 1975, when then-Gov. Ella Grasso helped create the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Now, we don’t.

It was the responsibility of the Task Force on Victim Privacy and the Public’s Right to Know to make good recommendations to the legislature for how to fix the law they implemented in a moment of haste. We had hoped the task force would recommend scaling back the restrictive law passed last year. We had also hoped the legislature would take action on these recommendations, realizing the foolishness in a law that was unnecessary to begin with.

“Any effort to impose yet more secrecy on government has far less to do with victim’s rights than it does with appeasing emotional constituents and shielding our eyes from what the government is doing in our names and with our money,” columnist Terry Cowgill writes.

By failing to act on the task force’s recommendation this session, the legislature has not only wasted a lot of people’s time and energy, it has also let a very bad law remain on the books.

At the end of this legislative session, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy issued a statement mentioning all that was accomplished. We think the failure to improve last year’s FOI restrictions is a clear sign that current elected officials — Malloy included — do not value transparency as much as they value the pretense of it.